Exploring Innovations in Teaching and Learning at Everett Community College

How many EvCC courses use Canvas?

Published July 10, 2017 by
John Melson

I’m asked on a fairly regular basis how many courses at EvCC use the campus learning management system, Canvas, in some capacity. There are many reasons for this question–ranging from general curiosity to specific ideas the questioner may have about, say, the most effective methods for communicating with students–but until fairly recently I couldn’t provide a very reliable answer. That’s partly due to the fact that we automatically create an empty Canvas course (what we sometimes call a “shell”) for every course at the college, meaning we can’t automatically assume the existence of a course in Canvas indicates active use by the faculty member teaching that course. The difficulty in pinning down exactly how many courses use Canvas is also due, in part, to the many other purposes for which faculty, staff, and students use Canvas: clubs and student organizations; departmental or program-based groups; faculty and staff programs; and so on.

Unsatisfied with only being able to say that “many” or “the majority” of courses at the college use Canvas in some way, I set out last fall to develop a more reliable measure of Canvas use and its change, if any, over the past few years. I’m happy to say the results are in. By combining course information from our student management system with data from the Canvas API, we can quickly identify the subset of Canvas shells that correspond to courses students take for credit at the college. Then, within that subset, we look only at those courses that have been published and that have at least 3 students enrolled. (I won’t bore you with the details of why that is necessary, but in general it helps filter out a variety of unusual cases that might otherwise provide a false sense of the rate of Canvas use.)

This yields a reasonably good approximation of actual Canvas use for credit-bearing courses at EvCC:

As this chart shows, 83% of courses at the college used Canvas in the spring of 2017, up from about 68% when we first moved to Canvas in 2013.

Obviously, this doesn’t tell us anything at all about how Canvas is being used, or why, or whether it benefits students or faculty. There are other data that could help us begin to investigate all of those more nuanced and complex questions–and I hope to write about some of that here in the future–but these numbers alone doesn’t tell any of those stories. Still, it’s interesting to observe the adoption of this particular platform on our campus over time.